Category Archives: Accellos Warehouse Management System (WMS)

The continued development of AccellosOne Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) has just been released in the latest version-6.5. This AccellosOne WMS 6.5 Brochure will highlight some of the rich features for better inventory control and warehouse operationally efficiency.

In your day-to-day activity in your warehouse, does your time center on any of these common questions?

How much warehouse space do I have? Can I make better use of space?

How can I support increasing sales without increasing employees or warehouse area?

Fluctuations in supply and what to do to manage these?

Our “paper-driven” warehouse is very costly to the company; how much money could be we saving?

Tighten Control: AccellosOne provides you with the tools to maintain better inventory accuracy minimizing writedowns and writeoffs. To insurance compliance with your customers labeling requirements. Improve your control in these and many more key areas of your business.

Maximize Efficiency: Leverage WMS’s advanced processes to improve your picking and receiving functions. To eliminate manual order checking. These are just a few areas where AccellosOne helps your team gain efficiency and effectiveness.

Improve Visibility: AccellosOne’s web-centric design give you the ability to allow internal and external users visibility into the status of warehouse operations. Providing visibility creates competitive differentiation for your business that drive Return On Investment (ROI).

There many reasons why a business decides to look at an electronic warehouse inventory management solution. In many cases it’s one event that will finally push the decision makers at a company to take action. This event usually has had a significant price tag associated with it. Here is a short list of events that can create big costly problems in a paper-driven warehouse:

Loss of one or more customers

Continued lost sales due to poor fill rates or inaccurate inventory

Warehouse has run out of space

Inventory costs are too high

Overhead costs are out of control

Inventory accuracy has dropped below an acceptable percentages

High turnover rate for employees

I know there are more but I’m pretty sure you get the idea. Any event that drives up your costs in the warehouse or contributes to lost sales or worse lost customers are what I consider trigger events that should drive a business owner to look at a WMS.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking your business is too small to consider a WMS. It’s just not the case. And don’t be put off by the price tag. The return on investment of a properly installed warehouse management solution can be astonishing and in most cases a WMS will;

Increase your profits

Improve your customer satisfaction

Increase employee accountability & productivity

Reduce Inventory problems

Lower overhead

Improve warehouse space usage

If finding ways to improve your company’s bottom line makes sense to you, check out a warehouse management solution. You owe it to yourself, your business, your customers and your employees.

The barcode label is everywhere and it is no longer just a bunch of odd shaped vertical lines with numbers under them. Today you can store a tremendous amount of information in a small rectangular shaped barcode. Retailers have been scanning barcodes at check outs for years. But how are they used in conjunction with a warehouse management system and more important why?

The barcode label is the key or backbone of most WMS solutions. The second product hits your dock to be received you begin using the barcode on the product to receive it into inventory and track it throughout its life in your warehouse. If you receive product that does not have a barcode you can print one for it based on the information you want to be imbedded in it. Barcodes can hold quite a lot of info, item numbers and lot numbers to mention a couple.

Once we have scanned the barcode during the receiving process we then can put the product away, move it, replenish pick bins and pick it using the barcode on the item. Inventory never gets lost. You can always see what you have and where it is in the warehouse. Barcoding keeps your inbound staff from making mistakes by not receiving the correct items and keeps your pick staff from making mistakes by not picking the correct items. Your material handlers keep from making mistakes like moving the wrong items to the wrong location or replenishing the wrong pick bin. Barcodes make cycle counting the inventory a snap and this allows you to stop doing time consuming and expensive physical inventories.

This is all tied together by the warehouse management system which tracks all the work and movement in the warehouse of your products and people and delivers the correct real time pertinent information back to your ERP system.

WMS solutions like Accellos One Warehouse are all about cost savings. These savings can be added directly back into the business. This is crucial in today’s business market. The barcode, no matter how simple or complex it needs to be, is at the center of these savings.

Less than 30 percent of warehouses are efficient, according to “Benchmarking Warehouse Performance,” a study by Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta GA Efficiency translates directly into money. You may have been wondering if a WMS system could make your warehouse more efficient. Interestingly, about 30 percent of the warehouses in the United States have a WMS system installed. What are the numbers telling us? Only 30 percent of warehouses are efficient, and less than 30 percent of warehouses have a WMS system installed. Which 30% does your company fall into? If you are in the under 30% group that does use a WMS good for you. Most likely you are many times over more efficient than those not using a WMS to manage their warehouse operations.

Those numbers are telling me we can fix the inefficiencies or “lost revenues” taking place in over 70 percent of warehouses. These leaks involve serious money being lost and customers being poorly serviced. My point is this: There’s a lot of information out there on how to make your warehouse more efficient, but what you needs to realized is, “It’s not what you know that counts, it’s what you do with what you know.” Many companies already know their warehouse is inefficient, but are reluctant to make the move to improve due to what they perceive as a high cost to purchase and install a WMS. I would suggest they should take a very close look at the ROI that a good WMS can achieve. It might surprise many to find out that the initial investment can be recouped in a very short amount of time. If you own or manage a business that operates a warehouse which 30% do you want to be in??